/* Rambling comments... */

Lock contention

2008-10-21T10:43:19+00:00

I had reason to run my deadlock detection tool on a server built with an old version of the server framework as I needed to make changes to the server's locking strategy and I wanted to make sure that I...

]]> Posted by Len at 10:43 AM | Comments (1) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]>

/Wall

2008-10-19T22:25:58+00:00

I've been compiling with /W4 for some time now. I didn't realise that this wasn't the best you could get. There are some warnings which are not enabled by default and therefore aren't included in /W4. To enable these you...

]]> Posted by Len at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]>

Goodbye old friend

2008-10-17T16:54:13+00:00

As of release 5.2.4, which is due for release in December, we will no longer support Visual Studio 6 builds of the server framework. I've recently had to deal with some weird multi-threaded problems for a client and upgrading them...

]]> Posted by Len at 04:54 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]>

Asynchronous SChannel Servers

2008-10-09T13:49:09+00:00

I'm currently working on an SChannel version of the asynchronous SSL connector code that we use to provide SSL support in the server framework. This will eventually be an alternative to the existing OpenSSL support that we currently provide and...

]]> Posted by Len at 01:49 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]>

STLPort 5.1.5 and VS2008 and x64

2008-10-01T11:06:05+00:00

I've been meaning to build STLPort for Visual Studio 2008 for some time now but as the STL support that ships with Visual Studio has been improved the urgency to be able to use an alternative has reduced. Unfortunately STLPort...

]]> Posted by Len at 11:06 AM | Comments (1) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]>

Alternative call stack capturing

2008-09-25T09:34:31+00:00

I've just stumbled on these blog posts, by Maciej Sinilo, a game developer. He's written a memory allocation monitoring tool and mentions that using RtlCaptureStackBackTrace() is a faster (if undocumented) way to capture a call stack. This is interesting to...

]]> Posted by Len at 09:34 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Debugging Tools ]]>

How does the socket server framework compare to Boost::ASIO?

2008-09-24T09:23:23+00:00

I've had a few questions from users and potential users of the JetByte server framework about how it compares to other available frameworks. One such framework is ASIO. The first thing to realise is that the JetByte framework and ASIO...

]]> Posted by Len at 09:23 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]>

WM_TIMECHANGE broadcast strangeness...

2008-09-09T18:05:03+00:00

I'm currently writing and testing a simple class that watches for system time changes. This is to allow an app to adjust some timers that it sets for absolute times in the future if the system time changes. The code's...

]]> Posted by Len at 06:05 PM | Comments (3) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]>

Log file rotation

2008-09-05T17:08:19+00:00

I'm in the process of adjusting the asynchronous file log that we use in some of our servers. The log works well and write performance is good for a variety of reasons that I deal with here. The current changes...

]]> Posted by Len at 05:08 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]>

The perils of precompiled headers

2008-09-03T11:44:03+00:00

I'm working on some client code today and it's fairly typical of most 'Visual Studio Wizard generated code' in that it uses precompiled headers in a pretty poor way. The default wizard generated code seems to encourage people down a...

]]> Posted by Len at 11:44 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Rants ]]>

Connection collections

2008-09-02T10:30:25+00:00

One of the questions that comes up time and again from users of my server framework is "How to I access the list of current connections within the framework". My answer is, you don't, you build your own collection and...

]]> Posted by Len at 10:30 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]>

Flame on

2008-09-02T10:02:50+00:00

There's an interesting post over on "Blogging Considered Harmful" about why flaming someone for incorrect technical spouting is a good thing; I tend to agree. I actually WANT people to shout down my stupidity, if they're right and I'm wrong...

]]> Posted by Len at 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Rants ]]>

Practical Testing: 20 - Mind the gap

2008-08-12T12:44:19+00:00

Back in 2004, I wrote a series of articles called "Practical Testing" where I took a piece of complicated multi-threaded code and wrote tests for it. I then rebuild the code from scratch in a test driven development style to...

]]> Posted by Len at 12:44 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers , Source Code , Testing ]]>

Writing testable code

2008-08-07T09:05:52+00:00

There's a nice post by Mi�ko Hevery over on the Google Testing Blog about Writing Testable Code. It pretty much sums up my views on testable code. Go read it!...

]]> Posted by Len at 09:05 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Testing ]]>

Lock free code is hard

2008-08-06T12:06:50+00:00

There's an interesting article over on Dr. Dobb's about why writing lock free code is so hard. Herb Sutter takes some code from an article that Dr. Dobb's published a couple of months ago and pulls it apart and points...

]]> Posted by Len at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak ]]>